Believe It, You Matter, Part IX: Yes, it’s exhausting. All of it. Everything. Get rest and come back.

Sarah Jane here. I write all the Believe It, You Matter entries on OTYCD.

Let me tell you–there are times when I just can’t even with this fucking administration. Really.

I could only listen once to the ProPublica secret recording of the small children who had been separated from their mothers. I needed hours to put myself together after hearing the little girl who repeated that phone number, and I needed those hours because I would have been that kid in that situation, repeating those numbers like a magical spell of protection, over and over, until the spell worked.

I’ve had to detach myself from the news for days on end for the sake of my own mental health. I’ve had to do that more frequently of late.

It’s not just you.

Too much is going on.

The Trump administration is a container ship full of Dumpsters, all of which are on fire. But that container ship full of flaming Dumpsters is itself on a container ship that’s designed to deliver container ships, and every last one of those container ships are full of flaming Dumpsters. It’s Dumpster fires all the way down.

Superman would be hard-pressed to fix all this shit. Superman would be hard-pressed to simply keep track of all this shit as it happens.

Superman doesn’t exist. You do, though, and so do countless millions who have been resisting this administration since the morning after the election.

But to get that, we have to have each others’ backs, and we have to take periodic rest breaks. Self-care is crucial. Authoritarian regimes aim to tire out their populations with onslaught after onslaught until they give up and give in.

We can’t afford to do that. We can sustain a long fight. But we need to be smart and careful with our resources and ourselves.